“American Gods” Has Solid Launch On Starz

Starz’s much hyped “American Gods” series opened to very solid, but not spectacular, ratings on Starz on Sunday night.

The series, based on Neil Gaiman’s novel, drew a 0.4 rating among adults 18-49 and 975,000 viewers for its premiere in Live + Same Day results – about in line with the second season premiere of “Outlander” last year.

That makes it the third-highest series debut on the network, ahead of the pilots of “Black Sails,” “Power” and “Outlander” but behind “Camelot” and “Da Vinci’s Demons” which pulled 1.13 million and 1.04 million respectively with their opening episodes.

Amongst critics, “American Gods” scored a 77/100 rating on Metacritic for its first four episodes. That’s one of the better debuts of the year, but falls shy of the debuts of “The Handmaid’s Tale” (92), “Dear White People” (84), “Legion” (82), “Feud” (81), “The Good Fight” (80), and “Brockmire” (79), but ahead of “13 Reasons Why” (76), “Big Little Lies” (75) and “Guerrilla” (75).

While on Starz within the U.S., “American Gods” is being released on Amazon Prime across much of the world internationally with episodes airing hours after their U.S. debut.